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McDonald's Financial Skills Elearning

Using rapid elearning to improve profitability, safety, and customer care in restaurants – saving over £5 million on the way.

The Challenge

How do you balance commercial costs with sales and quality, whilst making sure you deliver on profit? For managers at McDonald’s, developing a deep understanding of these components and how they interact is a critical task.

It was one that was traditionally explored in face-to-face training sessions – every year, across over 1,250 restaurants. Not surprisingly, these solutions quickly proved expensive, and McDonald’s was finding it difficult to arrange the attendance of busy line managers. Our challenge was to explore an alternative, cost-effective blended approach for McDonald’s, which would give their managers access to supportive, relevant training at the right time for them.

Our Solution

In a matter of days, we developed a prototype for McDonald’s using Articulate. The result convinced them that this tool fully met their requirements – it was a rapid solution that delivered engaging learning, and helped us meet their strict branding requirements.

A joint effort

The project was very much a collaborative venture. We used the content and scripts developed by the McDonald’s team to create a quality final product. And because Articulate is so easy to work with, staff can develop skills quickly to be able to maintain and update the content – once we’d built the basics, McDonald’s could use it for years to come.

Becoming part of the McDonald’s team – we’re happy to serve...

As McDonald’s internal elearning capability has grown, further modules have been designed and developed; some by McDonald’s on their own, and some in partnership with City & Guilds Kineo. Working this way gives their team the flexibility they need, calling on us for additional capacity, or specific technical developments need that can’t be addressed in-house.

By providing an extension to the McDonald’s in-house team, City & Guilds Kineo provides an invaluable support and guidance with the use of rapid tools.

The Results

In the first 12 months, we saved McDonald’s over £1 million. Within two years, that figure had risen to £5 million – due largely to the fact that a third-party face-to-face trainer was no longer required.

Business results also reflected the success of the elearning. McDonald’s reported a 10% growth in sales, and a rise in food profitability that they directly related to the outcomes of the elearning. Strong, brand-led content has also resulted in an increase in the standard of hygiene across restaurants, as learning makes a real impact with employees in their day-to-day activities.

“Working hand in hand with [City & Guilds] Kineo not only gave me the opportunity to learn how the Articulate tool worked in a real world environment, but also gave me a good insight into elearning instructional design too. I felt confident to build my own modules during my time with the developers, which, I have no doubt, was helped by having a wealth of experience, knowledge and advice on hand if and when I needed it. The [City & Guilds] Kineo team was a really useful ‘safety net’ to have, giving me the confidence to try out different approaches and ideas.” - Paul Westlake

"This elearning and blended approach to development has genuinely improved the learning outcome for our participants. Our internal staff satisfaction survey has shown increases in all the training categories, improving employee engagement and increasing the ability of participants to transfer learning back into the workplace. The programme has brought about significant cost saving in the delivery of training and has improved learning outcomes. It has also led to an improvement in the key financial metrics of the restaurants." - Mark Reilly, Head of Corporate Training